affecting and elevating. Ah! a few of these pictures might save the
young man, and restore him to opulence."

"All would certainly be lost upon him," cried Eulenboeck. "He would only
squander it away again. What warnings have I not given him! But he does
not listen to an old friend and the voice of experience. Now at last
that the waters perhaps have come into his soul, his spirits sink
within him; he saw that I was affected even to tears at his
misfortunes, and solemnly promised me to amend forthwith, to work, and
to become a regular man. When upon this I clasp him in an affectionate
embrace, he tears himself from me laughing, and cries; but it is only
from Twelfth-night that this resolution is to hold good, till then I am
determined to be merry, and to go on in the old course! Say what I
would, all was in vain: he threatened, if I did not let him have his
will, to give up the reforming scheme altogether. Well, well: the
holiday will come in a few days; the delay is but short; but at all
events you may see from this how little his good resolutions are to be
built on."

"He has always," said Sophia, "been too closely surrounded by pious
people; from a spirit of contradiction he has turned himself to the
other side, and thus indeed his wilfulness has prevented his
intercourse with the virtuous from being of service to him."

"You are right in some degree," cried the old painter. "Has he not for
some time past suffered himself to be besieged in a manner by the
puritan, that tiresome old musical director Henne? But I assure you,
that man's dry sermons cannot possibly take a hold on him; besides, the
old fellow grows fuddled at his third glass, and so travels out of his
text."

"He has carried things too far," observed the host: "men of this sort,
when irregularity and extravagance have once become their way of life,
can never right themselves again. A life of order, one that deserves
the name of life, appears to them trivial and unmeaning; they are
lost."

"Very true," said Eulenboeck: "and merely to give you a striking
instance of his madness, hear how he went to work with his library. He
inherited from his worthy father an incomparable collection of books;
the most magnificent editions of the classics, the greatest rarities of
Italian literature, the first editions of Dante and Petrarch, things
which one inquires after in vain, even in great cities. It comes into
his head now that he must have a secretary to keep